Derek Jeter's Swinging Years

For almost two decades, Derek Jeter has spent his winters working out at the Yankees minor league complex in Tampa, Florida. He started these regimens shortly after moving to Florida from his parents' house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, so he could concentrate on his game year-round. Of course, a lot has changed since Jeter was chosen by the Yankees with the sixth overall pick in the 1992 draft: He no longer calls his folks every night in tears, no longer second-guesses his decision to turn pro instead of going to college, no longer wonders whether he's good enough to play with the big boys.

Today, Jeter is one of the most famous athletes the world has ever known. He's received plenty of personal accolades, starting with his unanimous selection as 1996's American League Rookie of the Year and continuing right through his eleventh All-Star appearance last summer, but he'll always be best known as a leader, a champion, a class act in an era when athletes are expected to be cheaters and boors. Come June, he'll have been captain of the Yankees for eight full years—which is longer than Babe Ruth, longer than Lou Gehrig—longer, in fact, than any other player in team history. Two years ago, he was chosen to lead the United States team in the World Baseball Classic—and of course, he's been a cornerstone of five World Series-winning teams. He's Tiger without the car crash, Kobe without the rape trial, Brady without the jilted pregnant girlfriend, A-Rod without the...well, everything.

Even today, after earning hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and endorsements, after building a 30,000-square-foot mansion in Tampa that the locals refer to as St. Jetersburg, after a string of famous girlfriends that stretches from Mariah Carey to Minka Kelly, Jeter comes across as a genuine, down-to-earth good guy. In September 2009, after Jeter became the Yankees' all-time hit leader, former Red Sox ace Curt Schilling described him as a player who'd "always been above the fray." As Schilling was quick to point out, he should know: "As someone who's 'foot-in-mouthed' it hundreds of times, it's refreshing. He's shown up, played, and turned in a Hall of Fame career in the hardest environment in sports to do any/all of the above."

So what's his secret? If you ask the man himself, it's nothing more than hard work. "My parents always told me, 'There's always going to be someone that's better,' " he says. "But there's no reason why someone should outwork you. That's just an excuse."

Of course, even with hard work it's impossible to outrun the realities of time, and there are signs that Jeter, who'll turn 37 in June, is just as susceptible to the ravages of age as the rest of us mortals. His 2010 season was, by far, the worst of his career—so bad that the onetime perennial MVP candidate was, by many yardsticks, worse than your average player. Out of the seventy American Leaguers with 500 or more plate appearances, he was thirty-fourth in batting average, thirty-third in on-base percentage, and fifty-eighth in slugging percentage. His defensive range was so limited—by one measure, he placed last among shortstops for his overall contribution in the field—that when he won his fifth Gold Glove award, a post on a widely respected baseball Web site read simply "My head just exploded."

His off-season contract negotiations with the only team he's ever wanted to play for provided yet another painful reminder that he's no longer the wonder boy shooting line drives with his inside-out stroke. In the weeks before Jeter and the Yankees came to terms on a three-year deal that will take him through the 2013 season, general manager Brian Cashman told reporters that he had "concerns" about Jeter's age and said if Jeter wasn't satisfied with the Yankees' offer, he was "free to test the market." It was the equivalent of the New York Philharmonic telling Leonard Bernstein he could go audition for the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra.

It's possible that Jeter will come back and have a year like 2009, when he hit .334, smacked eighteen home runs, swiped thirty bases, and was named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year. It's possible that all the time he spent this winter reworking his approach in the batter's box will pay off. It's possible, but unlikely: The list of shortstops who have continued to make meaningful offensive contributions in their late thirties is, well, nonexistent. And what then? It's not hard to be gracious when you're one of the best hitters in baseball—but what happens when the Yankees ask their captain to switch positions or move down in the lineup for the good of the team?

Don't look to Jeter for answers: "My focus is always one year at a time. I don't go into 2011 thinking about 2010. I haven't met a person who can change what's happened in the past, and I haven't met a person who can tell the future, so my job is 2011. That's the only thing I'm focused on. That's the only thing I'm concerned with."

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October 13, 2001

Oakland Coliseum

The Yankees are down, two games to none, in their best-of-five first-round playoff series against the Oakland A's. With New York clinging to a 1-0 lead in the seventh inning of Game 3 and A's designated hitter Jeremy Giambi on first base, Oakland's Terrence Long steps into the batter's box and ropes a shot into right field. By the time the ball rolls to the outfield wall, it's clear that Giambi is going to try to score. Yankees outfielder Shane Spencer unleashes a throw that sails over the heads of two cutoff men and bounces along the first-base line...where Jeter, in full sprint, scoops it up and laterals it to catcher Jorge Posada, who tags Giambi out. Two days later, after the Yankees clinch the series, a sobbing George Steinbrenner tells a reporter, "I've never seen an athlete dominate any sport—football, basketball, or baseball—the way he did in this playoff series."

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There's probably one thing I should get out of the way before we go any further: I am a season-ticket-holding, team-jersey-wearing, Fenway Park-loving Red Sox fan. I was at Yaz's last game. I have a framed picture of Pedro Martinez on the wall of my oce. I got so excited when the Sox embarrassed the Yankees on their way to winning the 2004 World Series that I spent the next two years of my life writing a book about it.

And yes, I admit, when I first got this assignment, it sounded like a big, juicy fastball down the middle of the plate: a glossy-mag treatment about the end of the road for Captain Intangibles himself. I could practically unravel the myths in my sleep. You wanna talk about Jeter's cannon arm or proclivity for throwing out runners while in midleap? I'll raise you his inability to reach balls hit in the hole. (It's not for nothing that Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay's "Passsssssst a diving Jeter!" is as recognizable a catchphrase as Marv Albert's "Yesssssss!") Mr. November? Please: Jeter has a lower career batting average and on-base percentage in the playoffs than he does in the regular season.

But then—and you have no idea how much it pains me to write this—the facts got in the way. I've always known that Jeter was a good hitter, that he was a smart base runner, that he had good instincts—but it wasn't until I really began digging into his numbers that I realized that, along with Honus Wagner and Cal Ripken Jr., he's one of the three most valuable offensive shortstops in history. He's already the Yankees' all-time leader in hits and at-bats, and sometime this year, barring injury, he'll assume first place in games and stolen bases. By the time he retires, he has a good chance of also being the team leader in runs, total bases, doubles, and times on base—and this is the franchise, remember, for which Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle played their entire careers.

But his on-field accomplishments only explain part of what makes Jeter so iconic. Just as important is his ability to project an integrity and underlying decency that in today's world seems downright heroic. Think about how few superstars keep their auras intact: The myth of Roger Clemens as a stubborn workhorse was blown to bits the second Brian McNamee started talking about injecting steroids into Clemens's ass. Lebron James's image as the hero determined to win a championship for his hometown team was erased the second he scheduled an hour-long ESPN special to announce his decision to decamp for Miami. Nobody thinks of Brett Favre as a good ol' boy with the NFL record for career touchdown passes anymore...they think of him as a flaky perv who texts women pictures of his dick.

Jeter—well, Jeter still plays for the team he rooted for as a boy. And while he's always been known for his appeal to, and very definite interest in, the fairer sex, he's maintained his reputation as a polite midwesterner who loves his parents, respects his elders, eats his Wheaties, and treats women with respect. In an era of Twitter feeds and Facebook updates and iPhones, this is nothing short of miraculous—especially considering the list of bombshells Jeter has been linked to over the years, which, in addition to Mariah and Minka, includes former Miss Universe Lara Dutta, Victoria's Secret model Adriana Lima, and the actresses Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jordana Brewster, and Vanessa Minnillo.

Part of the reason Jeter has been able to navigate the line between coming across as a ladies' man and a Lothario is that he truly isn't a late-night-at-the-strip-club type of guy. He's also put a lot of thought and effort into keeping embarrassing stories out of the tabloids. "I understand the interest," Jeter says. "I do. I understand people want to know. I get that. And I think in terms of your career, your occupation, they can know anything they want." When it comes to what he does after hours, though, "some things should be kept private."

The logistics of this can be tricky: Earlier in his career, on the rare occasions when he did go out at night, he'd enter and leave clubs through a different door than his dates. In The Captain, his forthcoming biography of Jeter, Ian O'Connor writes about a small party Jeter hosted. When Jeter's then flame and one of her girlfriends arrived at his house, "Jeter answered the door and politely asked his guests to remove any cell phones or cameras they were carrying and place them on a table, explaining that he wanted to protect his privacy."

By all accounts, when Jeter has felt at risk of being exposed, he's taken swift steps. About ten years ago, a freelancer working on a piece for The New York Times was in the Yankees locker room after batting practice. Jeter and some other players were joking around—"it was something totally innocuous," the reporter says—when Jeter realized there was a tape recorder in the room. Later that night, the reporter was buttonholed by a Yankees PR staffer and one of the team's security guards. When the reporter tried to apologize to Jeter for any misunderstanding, he says, Jeter refused to acknowledge that anything had happened in the first place.

Even those people whose job it is to dig up dirt on celebrities can only shake their heads in amazement. "Derek Jeter could be a guru," says Richard Johnson, the Los Angeles bureau chief of The Daily and legendary former editor of the New York Post's gossip column, Page Six. "There's never been any kiss-and-tell stuff where a girl breaks up with Jeter and then says what a creep he is. I don't know how he avoids it. He must have some sort of vetting process—maybe he makes them fill out a questionnaire or has a psychological profile done. He's incredible."

Jeter attributes his ability to avoid getting caught up in scandals to his upbringing and his never losing sight of what he wanted to do with his life. "Don't get me wrong, it's not like I didn't go out and have fun," he says. "But there's been a lot of players that come to New York and get caught up in the lifestyle, and before you know it, they're sent away to another team because it affected their performance. My number one priority was on the field. I've had fun. It's not like I've never gone out; I've done a lot of things. But I've always kept sight of my number one priority."

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July 1, 2004

Yankee Stadium

It's the top of the twelfth, and the Yankees and Red Sox have been tied, 3-3, since the seventh inning. With runners on second and third and two outs, Boston's Trot Nixon lofts a pitch into shallow left field. Jeter catches the ball on a dead sprint, saving two runs in the process, before his momentum carries him straight into the stands. When he's helped back onto the field, his chin is bruised and his face is bloodied. He spends the rest of the game in the hospital.

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A few years ago, Joe Posnanski, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, coined Jeterate, a verb defined as "to praise someone for something of which he or she is entirely unworthy of praise." It's the tendency on the part of fans, sportswriters, and broadcasters to Jeterate Jeter that drives baseball aficionados who don't live in the tristate area absolutely batshit insane. Derek Jeter is a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He's a cornerstone of a team that has made the playoffs for fourteen of his fifteen full seasons. He's the only player in history to hit 200 home runs and steal 300 bases as a shortstop.

But he's not, contrary to how he's often described, Mother Teresa, Superman, and JFK all rolled into one. His dive into the stands was gutsy—but it wasn't, as George Steinbrenner insisted, proof that Jeter was "a great leader and an inspiration for all of our nation's youth." The New York Daily News wrote: "Imagine if every team in every sport had a Derek Jeter? There would be no show-offs, no reason for fans to turn away in disgust. In this bizarro world, busting out of the box or chasing fly balls as if they were a winning lottery ticket would be the norm." Also, Republicans and Democrats would agree to work together, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would host a Passover Seder for Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tom Cruise would renounce Scientology.

"He's a guy who goes out there every day and plays hard, and he leads, and he's a consummate professional," says Posnanski. "And he really is what people say he is as a player—just not to the extent that they say it." Part of the reason that he's so lionized is that in the cloistered world of professional sports, an athlete whose image matches his actual day-to-day life is almost unthinkable. Think about the two other superstar shortstops Jeter came up with in the late 1990s: By the time Nomar Garciaparra bitched and moaned his way out of Boston, he'd revealed himself to be an obsessive-compulsive misanthrope who found talking to the media more exhausting than actually playing baseball. A-Rod frosted his hair, divorced his wife, dated Madonna, and 'roided up.

Jeter, meanwhile, has become even more Jeter-y over the years. "I honestly don't think that Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, any of those guys, would have had the same sort of aura or legacy about them in this age," says the Daily News's Mark Feinsand. (He's definitely right about that.) "He's not the most interesting quote in the world; that's by design. He's very courteous, polite, respectful. He knows what we're looking for."

The sense that Jeter is a little bit embarrassed by the hullabaloo that accompanies his every move is one thing that has kept him from being insufferable. He's always known he was a good player—even a great one—but he's never seemed to have any illusions about his place in the baseball firmament. When A-Rod signed his ten-year $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers before the 2001 season, Jeter didn't try to top him; he was arguably the second-best shortstop in baseball, and he ended up with the second-highest contract. When the Yankees traded for A-Rod three years later, Jeter didn't bring up the infamous article in which Rodriguez was quoted as saying that because Jeter had "been blessed with great talent around him" on the Yankees, he'd "never had to lead."

But then came last winter's contract negotiations. By most accounts, Jeter and his agent, Casey Close, were looking for a deal in the neighborhood of four-plus years at an average annual salary of more than $20 million. You can understand why Jeter might have thought this was what he deserved—the contract extension that A-Rod signed with the Yankees in 2007 will keep Rodriguez in New York past his forty-second birthday and has an average annual value of $27.5 million—but the Yankees told Jeter to get real. (At one point, "a source close to the negotiations" told ESPN that Jeter needed to "drink the reality potion" if that's what he thought he was worth.) After the Yankees offered Jeter a three-year deal worth $45 million, Brian Cashman told the media that the offer had taken "his contributions to the franchise...into account." It was a shocking moment: For the first time, the Yankees showed they were perfectly willing to smack down their iconic, infallible captain in public.

Throughout it all, Jeter, who'd made it clear that he had no desire to play for a team other than the Yankees, kept his mouth shut. It was only at the press conference announcing the three-year $51 million deal the two sides eventually agreed to that Jeter acknowledged that he'd been pissed off by the team's approach: "To hear the organization tell me to go shop it when I just told you I wasn't going to—if I'm going to be honest with you, I was angry about it."

And that was it. When I asked Jeter about the negotiations, he said he was done discussing what happened. "I always said I wasn't going to talk about it," he says. "I didn't talk about it. I addressed it one time in the press conference, and I won't bring it up again. In my mind, it's over with, it's done with. That's how I've always been, and that's how I'll always be. I think when things linger, that's when they become a distraction. I don't want any distractions."

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September 10, 2010

Rangers Ballpark

Jeter goes one for seven in a thirteen-inning loss to the Texas Rangers, his only hit coming on a third-inning dribbler that he beat out for a single. Jeter's final out comes in the top of the twelfth, when he fails to advance a runner from third with one out. Five days later, with his batting average at .262, Jeter fakes being hit by a pitch in the seventh inning of a game against the eventual American League East champions, the Tampa Bay Rays. "My job is to get on base," he explains to reporters later.

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Sometime in the next few years, one of the most remarkable runs in sports will come to an end: Jeter, catcher Jorge Posada, and closer Mariano Rivera will no longer share space on the New York Yankees' roster. The three men have been teammates for sixteen years—longer than any other trio in Major League Baseball or the NBA, NFL, or NHL—and they've been named to a total of All-Star teams twenty-three times since 2000. It's possible all three will end up in the Hall of Fame.

Along with Andy Pettitte, who pitched for the Yankees from 1995 through 2003 and from 2007 through last season, Jeter, Posada, and Rivera formed the "Core Four"—a group of stars who were groomed in the Yankees' farm system and went on to form the soul of the team that won four championships in five seasons. In a clubhouse that rotated in players like Jason Giambi, Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, and Gary Sheeld, these were the guys that redeemed the club.

Those days are coming to an end. Mariano remains one of the best closers in the game, but he spends ever less time sawing off hitters' bats with his cut fastball: With the exception of his injury-plagued 2002, the sixty innings Rivera pitched last year were the least of his career. Posada, meanwhile, lost his job as the Yankees' starting catcher, and he's been talking openly about hanging up his cleats for good. And on the morning of February 4, Pettitte, who was named to his third All-Star Game last year, announced his retirement.

I met up with Jeter that afternoon in a Starbucks near his house in Tampa. Jeter didn't watch Pettitte's press conference—he was doing his weekday-morning workout—and he ignored my efforts to get him to talk about the implications for his own career. "It's something you won't even realize until you get to spring training," he said when I asked him whether Pettitte's decision made him think about his own future. "But the thing about Andy is, he left for three years to play in Houston. You don't want to say you're used to him not being there, but at least you have something to compare it to. There was a while there where he was gone."

In between accommodating gawkers requesting autographs and cell-phone snapshots, Jeter insisted he's not thinking about the day when he won't be spending the winter staying in shape, won't be playing spring-training games in March, won't be chasing a World Series ring in October. "I think it's the wrong mind-set to prepare for the end," Jeter said. (A few minutes later, I noticed a fan uploading a picture he had just taken with Jeter onto his Facebook page.) "I think you know when you get there. But I don't sit here and map it out and say, 'Okay, five years from now I'm done'—'cause what if you don't feel that way when you get there?"

When I heard Jeter say "five years," I tried not to let my surprise register on my face: To my mind, the question isn't whether Jeter will feel as if he's done playing at some arbitrary date in the future, but what will happen if he can't compete at the level he's accustomed to before he's ready to give it all up. How will he feel if his role as a clubhouse mentor becomes his primary job description? Will Jeter move with the same pinch of grace if, in 2013, he's asked to be a $17-million-a-year utility infielder?

Over the course of two days, I spent more than four hours talking to Jeter. I haven't spent a lot of time talking to boldfaced names, but he was without question one of the nicest, most genuine celebrities I've interviewed. Perhaps that was because he no longer feels awkward providing answers that inevitably disappoint reporters looking for scooplets about the "real" Derek Jeter—and because I had no illusions about being the first person to succeed in getting Jeter to open up about his hopes and dreams. There were several times when I asked Jeter a question—about playing in the steroid era, or about players who preferred playing out of the spotlight of New York—and he'd slow down and grow more cautious. Eventually I realized he was worried I'd take what he was saying and make it sound like he was talking about a specific person or situation. When I called him on it, he readily acknowledged that had been exactly what he'd been thinking: "A lot of times, when you say things, people will try to turn it into [something else]. Sometimes someone asks you a question, and if you don't comment or dispute what they say, they'll take it as though you agree. I've always been very aware of what I'm saying, but I'm also aware of what you're saying. I always want to make sure that my point is clear."

Finally, as we were wrapping up, I asked Jeter why he agreed to submit to these hours of interviews in the first place. He didn't have a good answer—or at least one he was willing to share with me. "In terms of what I'd want people to know, I think they know it," he said. "We've talked about my story—I'm very fortunate to be doing exactly what I want to do for the team I've always wanted to play for, playing the position I've always wanted to play. You talk about living a dream or someone living a dream—if I went back thirty years ago and someone told me, 'Sit down and write out what your dream would be to do,' I'd be sitting right here."

By that point, it was almost 4 p.m. Before I left for the airport, I asked Jeter what he had planned for the rest of the day. "I'm probably going to go home and watch a movie," he said, grinning. "I'm going to watch The Roommate. It's a new one. Just came out today. Go check it out." It was a rare acknowledgement of his private life—his girlfriend, Minka Kelly, is one of the movie's stars. We exchanged some more pleasantries, and then, as he was climbing into his car, he shouted over one last time: "Remember: The Roommate. Seriously. Check it out. It's worth it."

Seth Mnookin's latest book is The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. This is his first story for GQ.

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